I recently wrote about the kindness of the American Midwest during my stint as a crew member for the Race Across America.

Today I write about the battle to stay awake, one of the most challenging aspects of crewing for this bicycle race, where we drove behind the cyclist for 4,800 kilometres.

I expected the hour before dawn to be the hardest time of all, but strangely it was the hour just after. You try everything, coffee, energy drinks, biting your cheeks, slapping yourself, drinking water, but nothing seems to really work.

I've never experienced such a great longing to sleep, which in bursts was as insistent as the desire to take a breath when swimming underwater.

This might sound dangerous, but after all it is a race, and the person who's at the greatest risk of being hit is the racer himself. He isn't immune to sleep either, and twice on my watch he fell asleep even while pedalling, and I had to honk the horn to wake him up.

But we were at the tail end of the race and actually had it easy, with our racer getting about four hours a night, against the leaders who get about one and a half. My first night of sleep was on the roof of an SUV, which wasn't nearly as comfortable as I thought it might be.

Many naps were snatched in the car, either parked or while someone else drove. I also spent a couple of blissful hours sprawled over the luggage on the back seat.

Several times we spread out at petrol station parking lots including some cold hours at a desolate station in the Navajo reservation in Utah, no other lights visible anywhere around.

And a few times, our rider and a team member slept on the shoulder of the freeway, shielded from traffic by the follow car with its flashing orange lights. Sadly, I don't have ‘highway shoulder' on my sleep resume.

You might think, "Oh I couldn't do that", but after the first day or two, the deprivation piles up so much that you'd sleep even if draped over broken bottles. It doesn't matter how exposed you feel, once you're down, you're out. At my most tired, I even found myself catching micro-naps standing up.

Fighting for floor space

You'd think that the few nights we got motel rooms, there'd be a mad rush for the beds. But no, the crew actually fought each other for floor space, because for some reason, even though the ground isn't blanketed in springs and memory foam, it is extremely comfortable to sleep on. (We had even tried it at home for a while, but sadly in the long run, dust becomes an issue.)

All that sleeping outdoors didn't feel dangerous for most of the race. There were usually other teams around us (though most of them had motor homes, there were usually extra team members doing what we were doing).

The only time I felt nervous about safety was when we were only three people, asleep near a lit shopfront on a totally deserted road in Cumberland, Maryland. One of the crew curled up in the car.

The physical therapist set up his massage table outside and slept on that. I spread my sleeping bag out in front of the shop (which sold porcelain knick-knacks, of all things), and as I lay down, I remembered the final scenes of that great road movie, Easyrider.

I resolved to sleep with one eye open, but that lasted all of two minutes. Sleep, it seems, is even more vital to staying alive than keeping your eye open for hammer-wielding murderers.

 

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.